Please read Convergence (I, II, and III).
This is a collaboration - Parts I and III are on circe's blog.
Convergence (IV).
Sal tries to flag down passing cars but, at this late hour, no one stops. Suddenly, he realizes, feeling a warm trickle into his right eye, that he is bleeding from a bump and a cut on his head. He must be a scary sight. Determinedly, he jogs on steadily. The bridge isn’t far now. 'Fuck it, losing my cell phone in the crash'. He feels his careful preparations unraveling.
On the bridge, Rachael frets and, despite Jack's warning, tries the engine again. It wallows, lacking the current to turn over. She returns the key to 'off' and frets some more. The dashboard lights have grown very dim. The clock shows 1:18. 'Just another few minutes and Jack will be here', she whispers, attempting to calm herself. The headlights of the car, front and back, barely glow with the remaining effort of the exhausted battery. High above, at the pinnacle of each arch, two floodlights barely shed illumination, through the rising mist of tumbling water, on the pavement and the yellow car sitting, nearly lifeless and immobile, stopped at the curb.
Minutes away, Jack sits hunched and white knuckling at the steering wheel, driving through the sparsely-lit, suburban streets. He turns automatically, barely slowing and tires squealing, onto the rural road toward the bridge. He hits the shoulder and the tires spin, spewing gravel and dust into the air, then corrects and bumps back onto the road, swerving, and speeds on. In his mind, a battle rages between the ghosts of the past, his own invasive terror, and the visceral need he feels to get to Rachael and not leave her stranded. He slows for only a moment to be waved on by a State Trooper at the scene of an accident; an SUV is front-ended into the roadside ditch
Frank Harrigan guides the heavy, short-haul rig off the sparsely trafficked through fare drowsy, late and impatient. He realises that he is going too fast and the air-brakes snort loudly in the quiet of night. The rig decelerates, swaying, along the curve and then roars through the overpass by scant inches of clearance. He ignores the stop sign, blowing across the state road like a hell-bent behemoth, and shifts gears accelerating again in the direction of the rural road and the company warehouse. With luck, he figures, glancing at the clock with it's numbers glowing 1:26, he will be unloaded by 2 o'clock and on his way home. His eyes droop with weariness and boredom and he shakes his head distractedly, automatically lifting the cup of cold, stale coffee to his lips – it has lost it's good effects and tastes awful. He swallows reluctantly. The rig barrels ferociously into the darkness of the rural road.
The seconds and minutes tick away and, at the centre of a convergence - lives tied together in dream, seen and felt, terrorising two men - sits a bridge.
The Silverstrand railway bridge, originally known as the W.R.R. No. 142, was build through the impetus of Roosevelt's 'New Deal'; a project to bring survival wages to the unemployed, rural men of the area and their families and to carry goods and freight more easily between centres. It also brought small passenger and loading stations and business during the darkest days of the Great Depression. The effort worked and communities began to appear, bringing forth, also, the suburban, residential area in which Jack and Rachael, Sal and Terri live, with green, manicured lawns and compact red-bricked homes – some still enclosed by the annually repainted, white picket-fences of the past.
The bridge, spanning the Silverstrand river, rests on three, massive, spreading, concrete pylons, sunk deep to the rock of the river's bed. It was designed to support, on its two lines, the weight of two, loaded freight trains, at rest, crossing it's entire length. The enormous weight was diffused through the side arches; great arcs forged in iron of single molds and mounted into spaces blasted out of the bedrock of the chasm's sides. The travel surface, in those days the rail lines which were later removed, hung from the arches on steel cables; each one the thickness of a man's wrist and, when the bridge was officially opened in '34, the locals officials and the President's representative, Senator Horatio Hackney (D-IL), declared that the bridge would withstand 'even the wrath of the Hand of God Almighty, himself'. He then challenged 'them boys in the South to build such a bridge as Northern ingenuity has produced' to much amusement and he posed for the photographers' exploding flash-bulbs. They broke a bottle of Champagne against the unforgiving support of an iron arch and two trains, bedecked in the colours of the Union, slowly crossed from the opposite ends, puffing billows of black, coal smoke into the air.
Jack pulls to a hasty stop, the front of his car only feet from the dim headlights of Rachael's and he climbs out, looking up and down the bridge's surface with tension clawing at his back and neck and alarms ringing in his head – he is aware of how exposed they are to the densely forested edges of the river's path. He remains stooped, sweat streaming cold down his spine, and crosses to the driver's side of the other car. Rachael is there, waiting; her own tension rising to panic level at the thought of the height below them to the thunderous rush of water.
“Jack, I'm so sorry...”, she begins and her eyes take in the battle-ready grimace locked on his face. He wastes no time.
“Try the engine again. We can't stay here”. He barks the order. The sound of angry river water intrudes, too, upon his war-wearied mind. The memories of his dream return and, with it, the strangling sensation of cold water filling his lungs. “Try it, again”, he repeats, urgently. It is 1:22 am.
Rachael tries to refocus and turns the key but she already knows the feeble whine that will return from the engine. She is right. Jack tells her to 'pop' the hood. He moves to the front of the car and, raising the hood, begins to feel around for the wires to the alternator. His hands are shaking and, more than once, he stops - freezes in mid-movement - certain, in his mind, to have heard, only steps behind, the sound of the bolt being drawn back on a Kalashnikov. He shakes his head, reminding himself of where he is and that he is 'safe' and yet his body tingles and hums with adrenaline, bringing with it the terrible urgency of the 'fight or flight' instinct. 'What's going on with me?' he whispers to himself, frustrated at his own unreasoned tension. Finally, his groping fingers find the plug, and with hope for a good result, he wiggles it a bit, making it sit tighter in the socket. 'Now maybe we can get the hell out of here', he comments. He lowers the hood to half-mast in order to signal Rachael to try the engine again.
Instead, his eyes fix, beyond Rachael and beyond the bright yellow car. A big rig bounces onto the surface of the bridge from the darkness of the rural road. It swerves slightly.
“Rachael! Get out of the car now!” he shouts to her above the roar of water and drops the hood. There is no doubting his seriousness. She obeys without a thought.
In the intervening years, especially after its conversion for use by truck and automobile, the bridge was frequently inspected for the signs of age that must eventually appear: stress fractures in the iron arches, rivets infested by metal rot, unraveling or slackening cables, or cement scales falling from the pylons. For all intents and purposes the bridge appeared as sound as it had been for 85 years. The inspections, however, never went underwater. In fact, the mortar used to meld the central pylon, the least weight bearing of the three, to the rock had been mixed with too much sand. Over the years, that mortar had been completely washed away and the pylon, left free of anchorage and subject to the constant thrust of the river's raging, seasonal temper, had shifted a full inch in the downriver direction. This produced an imperceptible angular rotation in the road surface and increased the weight load on the upriver cables by several hundred pounds per square inch – far beyond their antiquated tolerance.
Sal closes in on the last few yards, his eyes scanning the structure and his breath escaping in a mist into the cool, humid night air. A semi-truck lumbers onto the bridge like a runaway locomotive. Sal's eyes lock, widening in alarm, on the two vehicles, a bright yellow Accord and a black Volkswagen parked in the path of the oncoming truck.
At home, Terri returns to the window for the hundredth time and draws back the curtain. It is 1:30 in the morning. Outside the street is dark and deserted. Her fear and trepidation for Sal's safety has been growing to fever pitch but she is at a loss for what action to take. Dammit! She does something she said she never would. Grabbing a jacket, she climbs into her Beemer, and drives off to find Sal.
Frank Harrigan had dozed off, despite the caffeine load. The rig, entering the bridge, swerves beneath him and he awakens and sees the two cars stopped, illuminated in the truck's high, bright beams. 'Too fast! Too fast!' his mind begins to scream and his body reacts sluggishly but, it reacts.
The distance to the two cars narrows rapidly. His feet slam simultaneously onto the break and clutch. The effect is immediate: the wheels lock, spewing heavy, noxious, black, rubber smoke and, the more rapid deceleration of the cab, causes the trailer to slam forcefully forward on the hitch. The impact jars Frank to the bone but, the next sound that reaches his ears is the one that causes any trucker's blood to run cold with fear.
There is a resounding crash. The load in the trailer shifts and, the sudden weight change begins to pull. He clings desperately to the steering wheel, attempting to hold it straight but, glancing in the side mirror, he sees the trailer swinging out to the left. His rig is jackknifing, turning into a hurtling, over-weighted, pendulum – an unstoppable wall of steel. The steering wheel spins. His muscles flex, trying to hold the direction, and the veins pop with the effort down his neck and arms. His eyes widen, watching the looming disaster playing out before him.
Sal takes in the wild, whipping, back and forth of the cargo trailer, as the driver tries to slow; the shuddering, screeching, rumbling, slide of the trailer to the side, taking up both lanes. The semi, now jackknifed, begins easily clipping the inbound guardrail, sliding toward the stalled yellow car and the two figures moving quickly around it.
thank you for visiting.
please read the conclusion, 'Convergence (V)', on circe's blog.
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